On Travel

Lisbon: The Atlantic City

From France to China to Portugal, silver-haired, softly spoken Frenchman Frédéric Coustols is best known for his painstaking conservation work, drawing together his passion for vernacular architecture with the fostering of community spirit. But when I get close to a maquette in the gallery-café of his gorgeous, art-filled Palácio Belmonte hotel in Lisbon’s fado-loving Alfama district, I discern an anarchistic streak. The carefully crafted cardboard model of the hotel has been smashed up, with a human figurine—an acupuncture mannequin from China—looming high above it.

“That sums up everything,” he says, sucking on one of his beloved Cuban cigars, pointing at the artwork. “I love chaos. For me, everything is just play.”

When I checked in to the Palácio, an intimate 10-suite hotel he built inside the fortress walls of the medieval São Jorge castle, he showed me a mirror and invited me to “lose my ego” by staring into it.

“It’s about knowing yourself,” he says. “When you travel widely, and mix with people and other cultures and traditions, you take a different view of everything—including your own personal opinions.”

Coustols had made his first $10million in mergers and acquisitions by the age of 30; property was his thing from the start and punts on Paris’s residential market paid off. The sum soon doubled, tripled. But as he entered his forties, he gave up financing buildings and turned to designing them.

“Architecture, for me, is less about building things than living them. When I do a project, I have to do it to the limit.”

At a spritely 75, his limits appear to be through the roof. Every day Coustols says he answers 250 emails and reads a book (my room was full of well-thumbed tomes on design, urban planning, philosophy and fine art). He entertains guests—half of those staying at the Palácio are friends, such as Jeremy Irons (who calls the Belmonte his favourite hotel on earth). Frank Gehry, Monica Bellucci and Christian Louboutin have also stayed and loved their time at the Palácio so much they’ve gone on to buy neighbouring properties. “It’s an exchange. People who come here don’t just take, they always bring something,” Coustols says.

His vision for this corner of old Lisbon—a knot of narrow alleys that wind down to the Atlantic—continues to expand. Among the blueprints he lays out on the time-worn coffee table in the Roman-era anteroom are a new 12-suite contemporary hotel to be built behind the historic facade of a residential block, a gallery-studio complex that will provide free working space for artists and an affordable 36-room hotel with integrated social housing.

These ongoing projects are informed by his conservation work in the hamlet of Gers, Gascony—the pretty 37-room Castelnau des Fieumarcon that is open to guests—and reconstruction of the Ming-era Jiuxian Garden Village in Yangshuo. The project in southern China was exclusively for local residents and workers, but has since become a magnet for students of sustainable design.

“In the end, it all comes down to the village. In a village you have everything you need—you don’t need to move. Everything is a collective effort. Everything I do, I do to share with other people.”